


See How Eagerly The Lobsters

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Series: Cirque de Triomphe [55]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Batman: The Animated Series, DCU
Genre: Alice Through the Looking Glass References also, Alice in Wonderland References, Arkham Asylum, Case Fic, Earth-3, Gen, Mind Control, Mirror Universe, Tea, Undercover, or as close as these clowns get
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-14
Updated: 2017-04-22
Packaged: 2018-10-18 03:45:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10608615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: Or, the Problem of the Missing Hats. In which our hero visits at least one madhouse and at least one stage, breaks a minimum of four laws mostly relating to trespassing or impersonation, and is not actually given the opportunity to formally accept an invitation to tea.





	1. There Is Another Shore, You Know

**Author's Note:**

> Since he only appears occasionally, refresher that Basil Karlo is The Reformer, aka Clayface. He used to be an actor but then he got mutated into a shapeshifting sludge monster.
> 
> Titles from The Mock Turtle's Song, aka the Lobster Quadrille, which I memorized at the age of nine. Because Wonderland-related priorities, i haz them.

At least the white made a conveniently blank canvas, was what Harley had said the first time she made her husband up with a normal human skin tone, in the service of passing unremarked in a crowd. Since she hadn't known him before his injuries, she hadn't come particularly close to matching his old coloring, and the scars on his cheeks had been the only things that looked familiar.

That was, more or less, what they were counting on now. The scars had been smeared over with enough facial putty to conceal them, although it gave the whole face an oddly thick, stiff look, which presented correctly made him seem overweight. The bright red of his wide mouth was actually the hardest thing to disguise, but professional-grade film makeup was proving up to the task.

The canvas himself sat with a slouch in front of the bulb-ringed mirror, pouting.

"I always feel so ridiculous," J muttered. Actually he felt like a fraud, or possibly an organ-grinder's monkey. After this long, he was more self-conscious about attempts to pass for normal than about being a freak in the first place. Not that he'd say _any_ of that where his chief cosmetologist might hear. He had some tact.

"Shut up and hold still," Basil growled, spinning his makeup brush across J's cheekbone. He'd kept up his skills surprisingly well, for a man who hadn't needed cosmetics or costumes to play any role for over ten years.

"Seriously," grumbled Jason, who'd been lumbered with the less technically demanding job of covering the sides of J's neck with foundation. "If you mind so much we can always send Basil in disguised as you-disguised-as-not-you."

"No," said J firmly. "Like you said, I'm the one she trusts. She's had her sense of reality shaken badly enough. I'm not having her lied to."

"Your funeral," his grown son shrugged. "Just stop whining and wriggling, asshat. You're an adult, or so the rumor goes."

J turned a piteous look on Basil, who snorted and poufed him in the nose with the broad round brush so that a cloud of peach-colored powder rose. Not sneezing then took a lot of effort, for which Jokester felt he ought to be commended. "Don't look at me, _I_ didn't tell him you're a grownup," Basil snarked, and J gave up the fight.

They finished the look by doing a series of cruel things to his hair, the core of which was combing black dye through it—the end result was fairly obviously unnatural in its evenness, but with the thickness from the putty and the colors Basil had chosen, he just looked like a man pushing fifty and in denial. (Which, well, alright, he probably was coming up on fifty, come to think of it.) All that remained was to move and act in keeping with his new appearance.

He folded himself into a khaki greatcoat and rolled his shoulders up a little. Set his feet farther apart, dropped his center of gravity. Considered his looks in the mirror and then underslung his jaw, all Stallone-like.

Nope. That made his chin look about a mile long.

"Put on your hat and go already," Jason rolled his eyes. Smacked him on the shoulder. "You look like a jerk. Congratulations."

"If all we wanted was to make him look like a jerk, we didn't have to go to all this trouble," Basil sniffed, packing away his makeup kit.

"Hey!" J stuck his tongue out, and Basil groaned aloud.

"Get back in the chair while I fix your mouth, and for God's sake _don't do that again._ Or eat, or drink."

J sank back into his seat, duly chastised, while Red Hood laughed at him. The fix went much more quickly than the initial work, since he'd only disrupted it toward the middle where it was just a matter of coloring, and at the end he got up again, accepted his hat, and set off.

And then, because he was crazy, the Jokester walked into Arkham Asylum of his own free will.

"Detective Sykes," he told the receptionist with polished noir grimness and a veneer of boredom, flashing his ID. "I'm here to interview a Denise Springer."

"Really? Her trial's not for another month."

"Sometimes we manage to be efficient," Detective Sykes shrugged, almost humorless. "Miss Springer?" he prompted.

"Uh…yes," the girl tapped a few keys, worrying at her lower lip. "She's on Ward B, which is pretty low-risk, so they're allowed in the rec room most of the day. Do you need a private interview room, or would you rather meet with her on the ward?"

Private meant peace and quiet, but despite the name it also meant they'd be a lot easier to eavesdrop on. "I'll just head up, if it's all the same to you," he shrugged. She seemed frazzled and overworked; she'd be happy to have him choose the option that required less effort from her.

People were the weak point of every security system out there. Luckily for him, people were also his specialty.

He was buzzed up with minimal fuss, flashed his badge a few more times, was as forgettable as a lone lawman could ever be. Got slightly confusing directions, but he was good at directions and even better at Arkham corridors, and found his way to the rec room without much trouble. (Made a note for any future infiltrations that getting lost on your way to _anywhere_ in here would be completely plausible. He patted one of the old stone walls when he found himself unobserved. It wasn't the old place's fault she was run by evil maniacs.)

The orderlies evinced no suspicion whatsoever. Warned him that he wasn't allowed to take a gun in among the inmates, then reassured him that Ward B contained no one who'd offered any violence since admittance. He gave them his gun without a pang. The odds of anybody being inspired by the mere presence of a gun in the nurses' station to go on a shooting spree within the next twenty minutes were low, low, low. The biggest misanthropes employed here were mostly armed already anyway.

He'd never been held on Ward B; he'd been fast-tracked to E and, later, slung into the secret, underground Ward Omega.

Which, he acknowledged as he looked around, had been fair enough as far as escape-risk analysis went, because he'd have been out of _this_ place like a rat out of a cardboard crackerjack box. It was about as low-security as anything in Arkham Asylum ever got.

The layout of the rec room was the same, though, and the shuffling uninspired movements of the inmates, though the average level of antipsychotic drugs seemed lower here. In theory you were allowed to wear your own clothes in the asylum unless you proved you were a danger to yourself or others in them, but in practice that was a privilege they took away at the first opportunity, so most of the shuffling figures were wearing dull blue scrubs, like a conclave of zombie nurses. The actual nurses here wore white, when they appeared, which wasn't often, and the orderlies wore what were more or less guard uniforms. Even with the shakeups to routine that had been caused when Zsasz blew up Arkham Underground and exposed it to the world. Arkham had a steadily worsening identity crisis when it came to whether it was a hospital or a prison, and it _showed._

When he spotted her, occupying one corner of a sofa, Denise already had that dingy, hopeless look. Of course, there'd been blood and brains all over her clothes, so she hadn't been allowed to keep them. Her hair looked like they'd been making her wash it daily with the harsh institutional soap he remembered from his time here and no conditioner, which was a severely unkind way to treat chemically relaxed hair. Or maybe she'd been washing as much as they'd let her, trying to get rid of the feeling of the dead man, and damn the consequences to her coiffure.

"Miss Springer," he said in his best weary, clipped police voice as he approached her, and she raised her head to look up at him: dingy, hopeless, cornered-dog defensive—if he'd been a real cop, he would have thought she looked _exactly_ like the kind of woman who had snapped one day and blown off a Starbucks employee's head when he pronounced her name wrong.

But he wasn't a cop. He _knew_ Denise. And he knew the inside of Arkham, and he knew _not remembering_ , even if no crimes from his lost years had ever come calling.

He winked. Denise blinked. He flashed the badge. "I'm Detective Sykes with the GCPD. No _joking around_ , I'd like to ask you some questions. Over at this table if you don't mind."

The table was set up for checkers, though half the actual checkers were missing, and Denise levered herself out of the sofa and came over to join him at it.

"No joking…?" she asked as she sat down, folding her arms defensively across her chest again, her voice lowered against casual eavesdropping. His arrival and badge-flashing had attracted some attention, but the table was well away from anywhere people had already been, and none of the patients who'd noticed were willing to be that obvious about their desire to eavesdrop.

"None at all. We are very serious people talking about serious things."

Denise nodded. It started out slow and deep to show understanding, but went fast and bobbling really quick, and her slightly-glazed eyes were going glassy, like she was going to cry. "You have to help me," she whispered. She was afraid he couldn't. That was why the tears.

"Tell me everything you remember," J said, as comforting as possible without breaking character. It wasn't enough.

Denise's front teeth chomped down on her bottom lip, and she drew a long breath through her nose like a prelude to a sniffle, before barreling into speech. "I swear, I don't know what happened! I don't remember anything after deciding to go get a latté, until suddenly there I was, with the gun and blood everywhere, and that…good citizen tackling me to the ground. This has never happened before. I mean, _obviously_ this hasn't, but no blackouts. Before. Ever. Do you…" She looked up at him, imploring, the tears standing out in her eyes almost ready to fall, and then curled back in on herself. "Do you think I'm crazy?"

J chuckled, and reached across the table to tuck a strand of brittle hair behind her ear, which made her raise her eyes again. He held them for a second. "No, peaches," he told her, entirely in his own voice. "In my professional opinion as a crazy person, you're as sane as they come."

For the first time, she smiled. The flex of her face knocked the tears free, and they trickled down over the hopeful roundness of her cheeks, like sun through rain. "Well," she said, "that's a relief."

"So," J went on, a little more like Detective Sykes again because there was no point tempting fate, "working from the assumption that you aren't crazy, let's see what we've got."

Denise nodded. "Fire away." She was a little hoarse, but a lot further from panicking.

They ran over the basic facts; nothing significant had changed from the original statement she'd given police, after they'd sedated her and taken her into custody. He filled her in on one or two facts that she technically shouldn't know but which wouldn't make her more suspicious if she let them slip. Then J pulled a file-folder out of his big coat. "Okay, so, as your lawyer may have told you, the whole thing was caught on security cameras. I can't show you the video right now, but if you think you can handle it I brought a series of stills." She reached out at once and he handed them over, bright and glossy and official-looking.

Denise nodded, determined, and set herself grimly as she flipped through the sequential images. A shot of her face as she entered the coffeeshop, flat and composed. Waiting in line. Giving her order, in what another customer recalled as a monotone. Waiting, again. Pulling the stubby pistol from her purse, one handed. The gun was registered in her name, a self-defense weapon purchased a year earlier. She'd had eighty total hours of training and target practice with the thing. Gotham was dangerous, after all.

One ghastly shot of her standing with the gun still up, face blank, as the barista slumped over the counter, half his head gone, and the other customers panicked in the background. Jokester had felt, and everyone had agreed, that showing her the moment of bullet impact and gory headsplosion could not possibly be worth anything they were likely to learn from it. Her attention lingered on the somewhat less awful gory shot they _had_ given her long enough that J reached across the table and slid the next image under her nose.

"And then Mr. Harrison tackles you to the ground, and you wake up. So, apart from the obvious, can you see anything out of place?"

He gave her time to think about it, passing her gaze from one photo to the next slowly enough to be clearly weighing details, but not with that worrying fixated stare from a few seconds ago.

"It seems stupid," she said finally, fingertip tapping on the jaunty blue lady's fedora with a dove-grey feather tucked into the hatband, "but…that's not my hat. That's not…I've never seen that hat in my life." She gave her head a little shake, and looked up at him, eyes clearer than they'd been all day. "It's not stupid, is it? Because right there, where he knocks it off, that's when I woke up." She chewed at the inside of her cheek and looked up at him, folding her hands together to stop them from shaking. "Who would…."

J felt the space between his shoulderblades relax a little as the shape of the problem finally settled enough to start really tackling. "Hypnotize you to kill Mr. Nyueda? We already covered how you don't have any enemies, and unless he inherited some his father didn't mention after leaving Tanzania, neither did he." J shrugged. "Until you said you'd never seen it, the hat had a really, _really_ outside chance of being important, but now we'll check it out; maybe it wasn't personal, and it's just a cursed fedora or something."

Denise bit her lip. "If I was mind-controlled by a cursed fedora you'll never get me off," she whispered. "That's not the kind of thing the courts will recognize."

J shrugged again, answered almost as softly. "You'd be surprised. If we have to, we'll send Harvey in there with a dozen expert witnesses in the paranormal, and appeal it out of Gotham if the bought judges rule against. Just don't let your court-appointed guy talk you into entering not guilty by reason of insanity; since you're not a millionaire that's functionally a guilty plea that gets you off Death Row, and then only if they buy it."

"And leaves me here forever," Denise concluded; J nodded. "Fate worse than death," she announced. "Yeah, no, I'm good. I'll trust you." She took a breath. "Okay. What else?"

Detective Sykes left the suspect looking wrung-out, but more settled and determined than she'd been since before that awful five minutes in the coffeeshop.

* * *

Jokester wasn't actually, _technically_ , part of the community theater troupe on Park Row, but he'd been associated with the place longer than most of the actual members, at this point.

He still did shows, occasionally. Street performances of various levels of preplanned-ness and political relevancy, and sets at parties, and sometimes even on actual stages. His notoriety and his popularity tended to be about equal, and both were big draws, and even if he didn't have that many original songs, his jokes were all his own. But anyone who actually _booked_ him anywhere near Gotham was taking a huge risk, and he couldn't leave town that often. So when he wanted to do an indoor show, somewhere local, this was where he usually wound up. Just not frequently enough to attract Owlman's attention, so far.

Owlman had taken over this neighborhood a long time ago, but everyone was so poor all he really did with it was take his cut from the drug operations, crush anyone who tried to organize any crime without his say-so, and inflict occasional random acts of terror and extortion-by-proxy. Nobody around here liked him much, which was as safe as it got.

The theater on Park had been a movie theatre in the fifties, fallen into disrepair by the early seventies, and refurbished as a community performance space in '81. 'Jackie Holloway' was credited as Gratiano in the _Merchant of Venice_ they'd done that first winter; the amateurish playbill and faded Polaroids were still up in the lobby, pre-acid J grinning from under a floppy hat with his arm slung around the shoulders of the woman playing Lorenzo. She lived in Keystone City now. They still exchanged Christmas cards.

The lighting and sound boards here were 90% Eddie's work at this point. Jason knew the rickety catwalks as well as he did Crime Alley's rooftops. Ella had done the summer youth arts camp here when she was seven. The weathered boards of the stage made J feel at home in a way few _places_ could manage, all on their own without people helping. It was entirely a protective technicality that they were not members.

So there was nothing surprising in the fact that the youth theater director had called up at ten o'clock tonight near tears—the kids had their matinee tomorrow at eleven, and somebody had broken in some time this evening and vandalized the sets and wiring, and trashed the costume room, she needed some skilled hands to save the day. J had agreed like a shot, of course, and only belatedly thought to ask if any of his friends were actually up for helping with that, or if he'd signed up to fix it all alone.

Luckily, he'd gotten volunteers. Not everyone was available, of course (Basil, who was and always would be their #1 thespian, had already skipped town again and while he promised to come back if they needed him, petty vandalism emergencies didn't count) but enough that J was probably getting _some_ sleep tonight, and the patch job on the sound system wasn't going to leave it a franken-nightmare of a fire hazard. Ed was actually a licensed electrician as well as a genius.

Jon and Jason were sorting out the costumes, though the mess had mostly been handled and now Jon was sewing up tears in a princess costume while Jason searched the theater for miscellaneous child-scale hazards and damages that might have been overlooked.

Meanwhile, the vandals had sliced a bunch of slashes in four of the stretched-muslin flats the theater kept reusing for their painted sets—they'd probably have to scrape up twenty bucks for new fabric after this, but the kids had painted their own scenery and would be crushed to be stuck with hastily slapped-together adult replacements, so J had carefully glued patches to the backs and was doing his best to disguise the seams at the front with some of the same tempera paints the kids had used. It was pretty tricky, especially since they'd done a lot of mixing to get the shades they wanted. The flat painted with an intricately detailed forest was proving the biggest challenge.

"So," asked Jason, even as he shimmied up a ladder to check the vandals hadn't left anything heavy waiting to fall onto the stage, "What do you think our odds are of getting J's friend Denise off?"

"There's enough weirdness in the evidence," shrugged Ed, who was J's main support on the case. "If we keep digging and this doesn't turn out to be Wayne, or at least isn't a frame-up he's really _invested_ in, we can probably sort this out the legal way."

"Why can't the police do their own job," Waylon grumbled.

J clicked his tongue. "It's not that they can't, they _aren't_. They don't have any _incentive_. They have the shooter. They've got witnesses and video. She's a murderer, they got her off the streets, success, next case. Okay, she doesn't know why she shot him, but that just means she's a _crazy_ murderer, slap her in Arkham instead of prison."

"It's understandable," Jon pointed out. Shrugged a little, like he wanted to hide behind his shoulders, when they all looked at him. "They're always underfunded, even if half their budget weren't being embezzled, and this is hardly the most obvious miscarriage of justice going on." He sighed, and returned to plying his needle with a vicious will. "But most of them honestly don't _care_."

"So that's _our_ job," said Jokester, bumping Jon's shoulder as he passed with the corner of one of the patched-up flats, the one with a castle. Jon dropped his thimble, but it didn't roll far.

Ed snorted, then swore as the wires between his pliers sparked. "Some job," he grumbled. "Where's my pay check?" But he smiled as he said it.

"I'm sure it's in the mail."

Jason's laugh rung out from up in the catwalks. His voice wasn't all that deep, considering the bulk of the frame he'd grown into; he sang on the high end of baritone. But his laugh, when he let it go unchecked, could fill up a room like a church bell—it _resounded._

Having gotten the power shut off _properly_ this time, Ed sat back down to finish splicing the damaged wires at the corner of the stage back together. "Actually, I'm pretty sure it's been long enough since the last time that I can try hacking us onto Wayne's payroll again. This time I'm going to go with making us insanely highly paid 'janitors,' from a little company that advertises 'we make your messes disappear.'" He shrugged, and started winding black electrician's tape around the join. "I'm betting whoever in Accounting is supposed to catch that kind of thing is going to conclude we're the wetworks division and not say a word."

J's laughter expanded to fill the whole theater, and he carefully stood the latest flat up on end to dry before turning to look at Ed. "So basically, we're going to be claiming some of Jason's back pay?"

Ed stared for a second, slightly appalled that J had said that _in front of_ their ex-assassin, with all the implication that it had been a job like any other, like the one Ed had once had with Wayne's company, that he could be remunerated for, as if it had been _voluntary—_ until Jason dropped onto center stage with a snort. "Always wanted to support a family on my income," he said dryly, straightening up from his landing crouch. "Don't look like that, crypto. He owes me, he owes us all, and it's not like he's ever going to pay voluntarily. So we make him."

"Yeah," Ed acknowledged after a few seconds. "Yeah, okay."

* * *

 They were up late that night, as they frequently were, and when Jokester rolled out of bed late the next morning it was to discover that Ed hadn't slept.

"Got a brainstorm," he explained, waving his hand at the leftmost of the three screens he kept plugged into his main computer setup in their safehouse.

It wasn't his _best_ hardware—he kept that in his much more secret lab space that wasn't so likely to be compromised and need to be abandoned—but it was what he did most of his day-to-day work on, and it was better than most universities could get their hands on. The screen was crowded with part-sized windows, overlapped so they could all be seen at once, photos and spreadsheets and scans of paperwork. "I followed up your hunch about the domestic abuse guy. He still doesn't know what happened, and the cap he was wearing at the time was his, but it didn't get returned with his other stuff when he made bail. It's not in evidence, either. Doesn't necessarily mean anything; the cops steal and lose people's stuff all the time.

"I dug around, though, and there were two other cases like that in the three weeks leading up to the Starbucks shooting—a kid who started eating all the candy in a convenience store without paying for it, and when I say kid I mean sixteen and when I say all I mean he made himself sick before they dragged him out, and a lady who threw herself into traffic and survived, or we wouldn't know she didn't know why. And I've got something juicy."

J leaned in over Ed's shoulder. "Show, show!"

"The hat Denise said wasn't hers? It's not with the rest of her stuff in Evidence. It might be it got thrown away or something, maybe the police just missed it, but if you look _right_ _here_ , as it gets knocked off…" He turned to the still image, open full-screen size on the rightmost monitor, and zoomed in on the spot, his filters cleaning up the image as he went until they had detail not visible on the unenhanced footage.

J squinted. "Is that— _circuitry?_ "


	2. Turn Not Pale Beloved Snail

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I appear to have clean forgotten to give this story a summary upon posting its first chapter. The fact that it got hits anyway is...I'm not sure if it says more about how AO3 users relate to the tagging system or about how awesome everyone following this series is, but it definitely says a _lot_ about the latter so extra thanks to all of you!  <3
> 
> (lmao how do you forget a summary, I'm getting sloppy after doing this too many times...)

J squinted. "Is that— _circuitry?_ "

Ed cracked his knuckles smugly. "Got it in one. And then like you said, the next second she wakes up and starts freaking out. So, innocent little data-entry specialist goes into a homicidal fugue state with no apparent trigger, wearing a mystery computerized hat, and the hat disappears in the clean-up. Three other weird fugue incidents over a month, and we can't find anybody's headgear in evidence. I'm smelling a coverup. And in Gotham, where there's a coverup…"

"Look for black feathers." J nodded, his mouth curled into a tight, hunting grin. "I doubt the Feathered One is gonna have any more tech development done in his personal lair after last time. Looks like we have our next target."

Eddie grinned, too, and his flying fingers brought up the blueprints for the three main WE research facilities in the Gotham area. "Nostalgia, here we come."

* * *

WE security had improved since their first joint intrusion. It had been over fifteen years, after all. In the end, Ed decided he had better stay outside with his gear so he could ride herd on the security system, and let J go in alone. Jason offered to come with, but he had the shelter to look after and a lead in a missing persons case he'd picked up on a gut feeling, and when J assured him he'd be fine alone, JJ didn't press.

The area he was targeting was one of the mysterious hush-hush research blocs, way outside city limits, a boring cement block with three levels of basement. He slipped in without too much trouble. The ground level installation was just as boring as it was supposed to be, and everyone there and on the second level down had gone home for the night like well-adjusted corporate research drones. B-2 and B-3 had a few people on them, one possibly of the mad scientist persuasion, but only on the level where you don't brush your hair much and mutter to your microscope.

There was, almost inevitably, a fourth subbasement.

Getting into that was slightly harder, and J had to rely on some of Eddie's piped-in tricks to coax a door open in the end because the vents were too narrow for anybody but Ragdoll, and the locks were a little beyond his own skill to do quickly. As soon as he got below floor level, his comm cut out. No more calling backup unless he got higher up or blew a giant hole in the ceiling.

He'd cope. Hey, bright side, there went the temptation to crack jokes to Eddie that might get him overheard.

The door out of the stairwell was a little less secure than the one in, and he eased it open to take a look around.

Well. The room beyond was deserted, but that wasn't exactly its most noteworthy feature.

This was not a laboratory. It was about the right size for one, and in one or two places J spotted signs that it had been built with such a destiny in mind—the way the power sockets were placed, places for plumbing and the thin pipes that carry methane to burn hot—but it was very emphatically the opposite of that. It looked like it had been furnished by somebody's crazy great-aunt, if she'd gone to school for her fine arts degree and specialized in surrealism. The wallpaper was patterned with little chess-pieces. The actual clock on the actual wall _dripped_ , the numbers sliding down the face, caught in place like wax had been chilled halfway through melting, and the second hand still chirped its way around, pointing to 2 about where you'd normally expect 4.

A long table ran down the middle of the room, covered in a slightly longer white tablecloth, each place carefully set with silverware precisely aligned, napkins folded. Five of the places, near one end of the table, showed signs of use—crumbs on plates, buttered knives dropped carelessly, half-full cups of tea. None of the place-settings matched. There was a grey stuffed animal in one of the chairs.

The hutches and wardrobes and credenzas and side-tables and two grandfather clocks telling different wrong times that pressed against the walls as though they were holding them up would have been ordinary furniture, if on the fancy end; hardwood or pine stained to pass for it and brass and glass, except they were all built to different scales, one of the tables as high as J's head, one of the wardrobes barely large enough for a doll. The four of clubs leaned drunkenly against one wall, five feet from end to end but only as thick as a sheet of un-corrugated cardboard, and against it there were propped a collection of wooden mallets striped in primary colors, with matching wooden balls. There were paintings on the walls, framed in the kind of mass-produced ornate framework you could get at any big-box craft store—no photographs, and no human figures, except two people in dresses, very small in one corner of a sunlit landscape.

If Jokester had found this room in somebody's house, he would have signed himself up to be their new best friend on the spot. Here, in this place, under _that man's_ power, still and empty…it tasted bad. His tongue ran up the roof of his mouth, as though that would net him more information and a better understanding.

And then a door abruptly opened, and somebody came out, while he was standing in plain sight.

They didn't even double-take, which was unusual enough when strangers who'd been expecting to see _somebody_ laid eyes on him, never mind when he intruded on silent underground chambers. They smiled, and made their way toward the end of the table opposite the used plates and cups.

"Hello!" This personage was dressed almost as sharply as Jokester himself, with a magenta coat of tails in plush cropped velvet and a frankly very impressive stovepipe hat, which had to have been custom made because the man had one of the largest heads J had ever seen—definitely the largest on someone whose body seemed to be on the small side. He set down a steaming yellow teapot fussily at the unused end of the table. "You're just in time for tea!"

Jokester, for once in his life, was caught flat-footed. Considering how often he had inflicted this exact confusion on other people, it was probably karma. Very suavely he said, "Um."

"I'm sorry, I don't believe we're acquainted." The behatted individual leaned forward across the table, extending a hand to shake. "Tetch, Jervis Tetch. But please, call me Hatter."

 _Hatter_. Suddenly—belatedly—it all came together. There was a card tucked into the hatband, marked with a price in pounds sterling or something that J didn't know how to interpret—the _Mad Hatter._ Of course! Tea party laid for a dozen and serving two or three, croquet, oversized playing cards, even the persistent images of roses; it was all _Adventures in Wonderland!_ Mr. Tetch had a hobby. Admittedly it looked like it had gotten a little out of hand, but who was J to judge? The difference between a hobby and a monomania was less one of _degree_ than _presentation_ , after all.

The wonder was that, with teeth like that, he hadn't cast himself as the March Hare.

"Pleasure to meet you, Hatter!" J rallied, shaking the little man's hand heartily.

"And who might you be…oh," Tetch interrupted his own question, eyes focusing on Jokester's splendid waistcoat and neat white gloves before flickering up to his face again, and lighting up. "Why, the White Rabbit, of course! I'm sorry, I didn't recognize you for a moment."

"Oh, it's quite alright," J shrugged, falling into this new character with a much smaller, twitchier wave of dismissal than he'd have given as himself. Two infiltrations in one case! And he almost never bothered with any, with this face. "I'm trying out new ears, and all."

Tetch folded his hands fussily in front of him, radiating tiny affronted dignity. "Well, if you're here about the schedule, you'll have to tell their majesties to wait. True art cannot be rushed!"

"Oh dear, no, naturally not! More a sort of general _inspection,_ as it were. The Court has an interest in your work, after all."

"Inspection?" Tetch's face split in a grin nearly as mighty as J's own. "Oh, brillig! You want to see the _hats!_ "

Bingo. "Yes, exactly! The facilities and so on as well, of course, but…" J sniffed a little and made a show of checking his pocketwatch. The fact that it didn't actually exist seemed unlikely to be a problem. "I myself do have a schedule to keep, and all."

"No, no, of course, we'll start with the important part first. Come, come!"

J followed, on the watch for any ambushes or lurking security personnel but mostly just bemused. And rabbitish.

The room he was led into was much less busy, though it did have multicolored flamingos painted on the walls. Most of the floor area was taken up by an odd little arena, with little grated doors set around the base of the outer walls as though ready to disgorge thirteen-inch gladiators to do battle with six-pound lions. Little flickers of movement behind the bars hinted at actual captives, though J couldn't make out a single detail in the low light. A table in the part of the room outside the containing half-wall held what looked like a high-end music synthesizer array, right next to an old LP record player, with a gramophone-style trumpet-shaped speaker attached. Subliminal musical cues? Was that how it worked? He couldn't see any hats. Or anyone to wear them. Was Tetch going to demonstrate on _himself?_

Probably not.

The power on the sound station was already engaged, and Tetch carefully set the needle onto the spinning record, whereupon a slightly crackling, sprightly little tune sprang up. "Now!" he proclaimed happily, clapped his hands together, flicked on a set of footlights, and pulled a big, dramatic-looking lever that turned out to open all the little grated doors, sending the occupants of the cages beyond stumbling and shuffling out into view.

It was a motley assortment. Two squirrels. A tabby cat. An iguana _and_ a gecko. Two tortoises. Even three mottled brown lobsters, with the tips of their antennae poking out through the tops of their hats. These were all three wearing tiny bowlers, for some obscure reason—black, not green like Ed's. All the creatures, in fact, were wearing hats. The tortoises had funny peaked caps. The cat was wearing a bonnet, although he was fairly sure from its build it was a tom. J was strangely certain that Tetch had meticulously fitted the headgear to each wearer.

" _Won't you walk a little faster, said a whiting to a snail…_ " the mad little hatter sang along with the record, as he took up a station behind the synthesizer-looking thing, over which his fingers began to fly like those of a master pianist on the ivories.

" _There's a porpoise close behind us, and he's treading on my tail…"_

As Jokester watched, the assortment of creatures lurched in unison to assemble themselves into a tidy ring. "Oh, my ears and whiskers," he whispered.

" _See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance…_ "

When J had first laid eyes on Tetch, his impression had been 'harmless madman.' He was now forced to revise this opinion. Insane the man might be, and without a scrap of malice he could detect, but not harmless. Not in the least.

As he watched the collection of creatures waddle, skitter, and slide through a precise, recognizable gavotte, he felt his stomach churn.

This was what they had used on Denise, to kill Hasad Nyueda for no reason except availability; on that poor boy who'd lost his own trust and that of all who knew him, on the woman who'd lost half her limbs diving into traffic. He'd seen brainwashing before—the massively-scaled efforts of a semi-divine being, the intricate cruelty of Owlman's purely human tortures with Jason, the magic of Superwoman's golden whip, even other perversions of science not too different from this.

The music tripped along: _"Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance?"_

Jokester's hands closed into fists.

_"Will you, won't you, will you, won't you?"_

As if any of these creatures, any of the four or more poor human beings who'd had these hats put on them and been puppeteered into doing things against their wills and natures, as if _any of them_ had been given a choice. Will you, won't you: _you will_.

He'd seen it before.

_"Come…and jooiinnn…the daaance!"_

There was something uniquely horrible, though, in this. The mute, uncomprehending misery of the subjects, who did not know what free will _was_ to have lost, but knew they had been deprived of something vital as air. And the innocent delight of the person pulling the strings.

"Well?" Tetch turned to him, beaming, as the music ended and the dancers shuffled numbly to a halt. "What do you think?"

J's smile was not particularly delighted, but he thought it would pass. "That's really something… _remarkable_ ," he added, remembering his character and summoning up a bobbing, rodentlike nod. "Really, quite remarkable."

"The porpoises do a splendid ballet, though of course we can't go see them now. You should come again during proper business hours! Though it is so _difficult_ to keep the hats _on._ "

Dolphins were supposed to be really, really smart. J wondered if they understood what was happening. If that was a factor in the hat difficulty, even, and not just smooth skin and lack of chin, and the pressures of water.

He wondered exactly what Owlman had made of a grant request for dolphins, and dolphin-quarters, and whatever Tetch had felt he needed in order to serve as their milliner. That was pretty funny, though a lot of the fun was still taken out of it by the reason Wayne had signed off on those absurd expenses.

Dolphins were almost as smart as people, after all.

There had to have been controlled human trials before the current round of field tests, Jokester reflected as he allowed Tetch to steer him back into the tea room, jabbering happily. Tetch might or might not have administered those, but J doubted he'd been party to the assault, larceny, suicide, or murder tests. Had he been kept out of the way while someone with good mobile surveillance equipment played the board in the flamingo arena during those incidents, or was there another control unit elsewhere?

"Mm-hm," he agreed absently to a question about his schedule. It might be out of character for the White Rabbit, but he had nowhere else he was in a hurry to be just yet. If the latter case, Tetch might be reaching the end of his usefulness. Who knew what would happen to him then.

Either way, they were going to have _so much_ backup data to find and destroy.

"Oh, but I have been dreadfully rude. You _will_ stay to tea, won't you? Oh, Alice!" Tetch called out, without waiting for a reply. "Alice, dear, do come out! We have company!"

There was not nearly time enough to flee, or even hide, so J stood his ground. If he was busted, he might as well stick around for all the information he could get, and besides, maybe Alice (assuming there was an actual person and not a doll or something) understood the situation a little better than Tetch, and would be a valuable resource.

Maybe it was his daughter or something?

Only for a split second was it possible to mistake the figure that came through the door for a girl. She was small—probably not more than an inch taller than Tetch himself—with long yellow hair held back by a simple black band, and wearing a sweet little pinafore-style dress in baby blue, and there were buckles on her patent-leather shoes.

But her build was solid and her jaw looked permanently clenched, and her blue-grey eyes were very, very hard.

"It's the White Rabbit, Alice sweet!" Tetch proclaimed happily. "And he has time to stay to tea this time! Isn't it smashing?"

 _Pretty Alice,_ Jokester thought, meeting her hard eyes across the room and watching the clench of her jaw tighten. But really, this was no more the betrayer from his old favorite story than Harley ever had been. Tetch meant nothing to her. She was the guard he had been wondering about. Not one of the Birds of Prey, but definitely a professional, dressed up like a little girl. Wayne really was bending over backward to keep Tetch happy—which suggested he hadn't been able to find any less idiosyncratic researchers who could handle the project.

The question was, were her orders to keep the mad genius pacified the highest priority? Or was it more important to make sure his work stayed a secret?

"I really must be going now, though," J said fussily, checking the imaginary watch again. "Look at the time! Lovely seeing you again, Mr. Hatter, but the Queen waits for no man. Or rodent."

Alice raised her eyebrows, Clint Eastwood volumes of unimpressed with his performance. "You're planning to just walk out of here?"

J shrugged, disarming smile at his lips. "I have a way with doors."

Alice whipped a pistol from under her pinafore skirt and fired.

Jokester had already dived for cover behind the giant ornamental teapot. It shattered messily, but he was gone.

"You know," his voice came from behind her, and she snapped around ninety degrees and put a bullet into the far wall at ninety degrees to _that_ , only to find nothing there. "I really wanted this evening to end without any unpleasantness."

"Trespassers don't get to complain they weren't looking for trouble."

"I can complain about whatever I'd like to complain about! _Really,_ Marianne!" he exclaimed, in his best recreation of Disney's version of the rabbit. "This is outrageous! You've made a dreadful mess!"

"Mr. Rabbit!" Tetch brayed. Jokester really felt sorry for him. He'd very much wanted to get out of here without causing any upset. Of course, this comfortable little world of his only existed so long as he was useful to Owlman, and there was no _way_ they could allow Wayne to get this kind of use out of the man. But it could have lasted a little longer, ended a little less rudely. "Mr. Rabbit, wouldn't you care for a little more tea?"

"Haven't had any yet!" J obligingly retorted, and threw a saucer at Alice. Ducked out of sight again. Another bullet-hole through a piece of furniture, burying itself in reinforced concrete. If she wasn't careful they were going to get ricochets. "Can't very well have more!"

"You can always have more than nothing!" exclaimed the Hatter, his buoyancy almost completely restored by the exchange of quotations. Then he flinched as Alice's gun barked, shattering what turned out to have been merely a ballistic teacup used as distraction.

"Oh, what _is_ the matter?" Tetch fretted.

A high-pitched giggle ricocheted around the room. "Haven't you heard? We're all mad here."

"You lied to me!" the little man burst out in sudden realization, sounding overwhelmed by the betrayal. Both hands had come up to tug on his hat-brim. "You're not the White Rabbit at all, are you? You're the Cheshire Cat!"

"…it was the hair that gave it away, wasn't it?"

"Hatter!" the security staffer snapped, snapping a new magazine into her weapon. She should still have three shots left from the old one, assuming she'd started with a full clip, which meant there was still a bullet in the chamber, in case he moved while she seemed off-guard. Clever. "Get into the kitchen. Hide behind the oven with the piglet."

"Oh, but my dear!"

"I can't look after both of us when I'm dealing with a crazy…cat."

The man wavered, clenching and unclenching his hands. "You will be alright, my duck?"

"Who's the main character here, Tetch? I've got this, go!"

He wavered, wringing his hands, then nodded fiercely, once, and fled across the threshold, presumably in the direction of the kitchen.

J wondered if they were keeping a real piglet there, and if so whether it was under mind control.

As they watched the little man go, Alice stowed the old ammo clip in some kind of calf sheath, under the elasticized lower hem of her Edwardian-style drawers. "You humor him wonderfully," Jokester observed, once Tetch was well gone.

"Part of the job."

"What is Wayne paying you?" he wondered, and ducked under the long central table.

Another bullet zipped through the air. Apparently all of Tetch's ephemerae were replaceable. "Enough to get me into bloomers six days a week!"

"Only six?"

"Sundays they send in this annoying twink to play March Hare. Ha. Gotcha."

"No you didn't."

And she hadn't. Jokester waited until she cautiously moved forward to investigate where she thought she'd shot him, and once he was in her blind spot took his moment to slide up into the drop ceiling, from the top of the queerly lopsided china cabinet.

"So that's six figures?" he made the second-to-last unbroken teapot ask.

Alice gave it an unfriendly look. "What's it to you?" She held her gun in both hands, forefinger inside the trigger guard but not actually on the trigger, pointing up as she prowled forward. Trained. Trained _well._ Excellent aim. If he let her catch him in the open, he was going to get shot. He hated getting shot.

"I'm helping a friend with a statistics project," said the stuffed dormouse. "'Average cost of one human soul.'"

"Don't play holier-than-thou with me, you psychotic criminal," she snapped. "The state of my soul is between me and my priest."

"Well I'm not asking you for your deepest darkest secrets," said the dormouse. "Just your salary."

He'd gathered up five croquet balls in passing, tucking all but one into his jacket, and now he started throwing. Red, yellow, green, black, blue.

"Bowling for tea, apparently," he muttered, as Alice ducked red and the full teapot Tetch had brought out earlier and abandoned tipped over and washed its watery brown contents across the white tablecloth.

The blue ball struck the guardswoman on the knuckles, and she swore and came very close to shooting herself in the leg, but didn't drop the gun.

She unloaded half the clip into the drop ceiling, and J scampered desperately back, just ahead of the bullets, kicked his way out of the ceiling onto the top of a looming credenza, and knocked that over too.

The credenza crashed into the side of the tea-table, which almost arrested its fall and Jokester's, but then one of the legs cracked under the weight and with the slow inevitability of the Titanic, the long table listed onto one edge in a terrific clatter and smashing of crockery.

Alice had entirely lost track of her target in the chaos, and now she turned, slowly, beside the orphaned row of chairs that had been on her side of the table while it was still upright. Her gun was braced in both hands and her eyes skated intently over all the options for cover the messy space afforded.

A smoke bomb erupted from the wall on her side of the room. Alice spun.

As soon as her attention was grabbed, Jokester vaulted the overturned table with a silver teaspoon clamped between his teeth, skidded over broken crockery, rolled across mostly-clear carpet as Alice turned again and fired into another thickening front of smoke where she had heard him disturbing the mess, and unfolded directly behind her. Grabbed one of her shoulders so she couldn't turn.

Pressed the cold metal edge of the teaspoon into the side of her neck. "I win."

"You don't have the guts." But she didn't move, either.

"Is that what you call it? Guts? You think it takes _guts_ to exploit a crazy person, or to stand by while your boss turns innocent people into suicides and murderers? If this is what he'll do for research purposes, what kind of _goal_ do you think he's working toward?"

"What the hell are you talking about?" she snarled.

"The _reason I'm here._ Wayne has been testing these mind-control hats of his on random innocent people. He made a friend of mine murder her barista. Just to _see if he could_."

Alice's teeth grated. "You're delusional."

Jokester leaned a little closer. The longer he kept up the threat with the teaspoon, the warmer it would get, which would increase the odds of her noticing it wasn't a knife. He had real knives, but he didn't like to hold those to people's necks, it was a little too easy to have an accident if they struggled. "Not once."

With his left hand he reached over he shoulder, wrapped his fingers around the top of her weapon. "You know what delusion looks like. You've been taking care of it six days a week." It actually looked a lot of different ways, but he was banking on her not really believing he was that kind of crazy.

"Fine, you're _lying._ That's ridiculous."

"You really think so?" Alice didn't say anything, and this stalemate couldn't last. If she called his bluff and got him in her sights again this was probably going to end badly for him. "Is Alice your real name?"

She snorted. "Suzanne. Suzanne Jones."

"Suzanne, then." He tightened his grip on her gun and moved the spoon just a little, letting the curved edge of the bowl roll against her skin so it felt like the curve leading to the tip of a knife. "So what's it going to be, Suzanne? Are you going to let go?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Suzanne' is Cissie King-Jones' actual legal first name. I find this very weird. Trying to get away from Mirror Bonnie King's Black Bow & archery obsessions landed her in private security work using her dad's surname, but villainy just keeps finding her. 
> 
> Even if she wasn't avoiding the bow to reject her mom's idea of how her life should work, even a really compact modern compound wouldn't fit very well under a pinafore skirt. Maybe if it was a crinoline. ;]


End file.
